


Compass Points

by Glinda



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate History, Ancient History, Angels vs. Demons, Community: monthlysupergo, Friendship/Love, Lighthouses, Other, Penguins, Pilgrims - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27629786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: Crowley and Aziraphale follow the humans around the world, learning what it means to be human, and to be friends, along the way.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Kudos: 8
Collections: Monthly! Super! Go! 2020!





	1. North

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a table of prompts at monthlysupergo

The universe is big. Hugely, massively, incomprehensively big. In comparison, the world is tiny, and so far the humans have explored a teeny tiny part of their birth-right.

In the humans favour, they are incredibly curious; they like to explore and discover new things. It is, arguably, both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. It brought them north, out of Eden, through the dessert, until they reached this fertile...crescent...of land, and then they stopped. Reasonably, Aziraphale points out, given that the conditions are pretty close to perfect for their survival. Crowley will give him that, it's been a good place to practice agriculture - they're pretty good at it now - and learn about cities and temples and storage and fermentation. But there's a whole world out there.

It's not as though humans have never left this part of the world before, groups driven by personal or philosophical differences, or sometimes just plain curiosity have set off in search of new lands or a new way of doing things. Obviously some of them failed and died, but many of them built new lives and cultures. The important thing is that none of them came back, so the people, who remain, especially since The Flood, have no real concept that another way of life in another place is really possible. 

They have no choice now, since the Tower, they are being scattered to the four winds, and are setting out, mostly over land, but some by sea, into the great unknown. 

Crowley leads a few intrepid souls up a mountain with a good prospect, points out the potential glories that might be - are - out there, tells good stories round the campfire and generally enjoys the new and clever things that these humans are doing with their new language. It's his nature to tempt and he is very good at it, but he follows along with them as they explore this new territory. It isn't new to him, he's been all over the planet, but their fresh eyes and ideas make it all fresh and new and wonderful to him all over again. They plant things and build things, make camps and then homes and then cities. Sometimes they flourish and sometimes they fail, but he keeps whispering and they - some of them, not all of them, that's not the point - keep moving north. 

And one day he gets to stand under the dancing lights in the winter's night sky, and watch them reflect on the faces of these people, as they make up their own words and stories to explain them. Crowley knows the true names, the true stories of this wonder, and it is no less astounding and mesmerising, but still he revels in the human ability to question and explore, their capacity to be completely wrong in really interesting ways. The thing he loves both loves and hates the most about them: the ways in which they're allowed to be themselves.

He wishes, intensely, that Aziraphale was here.


	2. West

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley meet and linger in Santiago and find ways to avoid going to Seville.

They have been unusually fortunate in the weather on their walk. Their route follows the north coast of the peninsula, through land that is rich and green, and would normally involve a great deal more rain then they have experienced. Aziraphale, who is primarily there to act as translator - to 'smooth the way' for one particular pilgrim - thinks that thirty days of walking is sufficient penance for anyone without adding mud and driving rain to the equation. Therefore the weather remains fine and dry, with a light breeze off the sea preventing the weather from growing too oppressive.

The Camino de Santiago has rather fallen out of fashion among pilgrims this last century or so, the reputation of the Inquisition further south had rather put people off. Aziraphale suspects that his pilgrim of interest is unlikely to spark a revival of the route, as the only revelation any of this motely group of pilgrims seem to have had, is about the joys of sea swimming. In general terms, Aziraphale prefers the Mediterranean for that sort of thing, but even he can admit that a bracing dip in the Atlantic of a morning is just the thing for loosening off his sore muscles before they get back on the road again. 

In Santiago he finds Crowley who is on prickly yet solicitous form. He keeps making sly - far closer to cruel than his normal fare - jabs about Heaven and their works on Earth. Yet time and again, he seeks Aziraphale out, plying him with wine and truly excellent seafood. Aziraphale wishes the demon would tell him what's really wrong. Instead he ignores or bats away the jibes and allows Crowley to watch him eat and pay the bill, and hopes that the truth will reveal itself. It eventually does, though naturally Aziraphale immediately regrets that it does. 

The two of them stare at the commendation. The writing squirms on the page, in the way of hellish proclamations and contracts, but the meaning is clear enough. The silence hangs heavy between them for several long minutes.

"You didn't," Aziraphale manages eventually, more a statement than a question. 

"First I heard about it was when I was called down to give a report in person, thought I was in for a grilling for not causing enough showy sins, and instead I got this. It was all hand-shakes and back-handed compliments, and 'how did you manage its', so I just smiled enigmatically, said thank you and high-tailed it down to Seville to find out what on Earth they were on about." Crowley confesses all in a rush. "Your lot didn't give you one in that case?"

"No, no, I was as out of the loop as you were and I was 'inappropriately surprised' by the turn of events. Didn't, uh, show the appropriate zeal, when Gabriel apprised me of developments." Aziraphale stares at his own hands, as he makes his own admittance. Appropriate zeal was an under-statement, it had been all he could do to disguise his dawning horror as Gabriel had detailed exactly what they were doing to the heretics. Admittedly it had been unwise to say 'they don't need us to smite them any more, they'll do it to each other', but he doesn't think he'll ever quite forget the look in Michael and Uriel's eyes as they talked about it. It was...unseemly. There's really no such thing as _holy_ glee. 

Crowley gently clunks his tankard against Aziraphale's, shaking him out of his reverie. 

"Hence thirty days trek across Northern Spain with a bunch of pilgrims with poor hygiene habits," Crowley observes wryly.

"Something like that," murmurs Aziraphale, he tries to smile companionably at Crowley, but it comes out strained and twisted. He hasn't been down to Seville yet, can't face it, though he knows he ought to, that he'll have to eventually. 

Crowley dunks his own tankard against Aziraphale's again, "only one thing to do in that case Angel."

"Get completely rat-arsed and try to forget for a little while longer?" Asks Aziraphale, only partly sarcastically.

"Almost," Crowely acknowledges, "get very drunk and come up with a plan of what dastardly plan we can claim I was up to here, and how you thwarted it with cunning and, oooh, righteousness. Should give us a couple of months cover for enough sangria and seafood to take the edge of the memory for both of us, and earn us enough brownie points with our respective bosses that..."

"We can safely avoid Seville -"

" Never mind Seville, the whole of sodding Castille."

" - For at least a century or two, after which it'll have all blown over and we'll never have to speak or think of this Inquisition again."

"I'll drink to that."

They are men-shaped beings of their word, so they do just that.


	3. South

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are postcards and penguins, and a lighthouse at a different kind of end of the world.

The air is cold. Crowley always forgets that about South America. He remembers the miserable sweaty heat of the rainforests, those terrible leeches in Panama, the dust dry earth of the desserts. This far south though, it's next stop Antarctica and this time of year, when a storm gets up Isla de los Estados doesn't let you forget it. 

Crowley picks his way slowly across the rocks, towards the pale, familiar, be-suited form of Aziraphale. The angel looks, wind-swept, in a way that Crowley had forgotten he could be, that he hasn't seen since perhaps the Ninth Century. He scours his memory and comes up with an image of Aziraphale by any equally stormy sea. Somewhere on the west coast of Ireland perhaps, a pillaged abbey nearby, the word _garbh_ springs to mind, and Crowley has it now, Iona after it was sacked for the second or third time. Mostly he remembers too many bodies to count - 68 his treacherous brain supplies - in bloodied and torn robes, laid out on the beach. (A thousand years later it is still called Martyr's Bay.) Aziraphale had looked like this back then too. Scoured. As though all his grief and rage has been burned out of him, leaving him scoured clean and empty. 

"Did you see the penguins?" Aziraphale asks him, as soon as he's in ear shot. "Darling little things, aren't they? I'd never seen so many varieties of them in real life before."

Crowley lowers himself gingerly to sit on the rocks beside his friend. He doesn't know why he's here. Well, of course he knows _why_ he's here in general, he's here because Aziraphale had sent him a postcard, telling him about penguins in great detail. The angel hadn't called for help, hadn't made any requests at all, but after months of no contact there it was in his post oozing grief and loneliness so intensely that it had reduced his postman to tears as he delivered it. He's here because Aziraphale has seen something that upset him so badly he can't even look at it straight on. 

"Yes, Aziraphale, I saw the penguins," he agrees eventually. 

"I always think the Gentoos are the platonic ideal of penguins," Aziraphale tells him brightly, looking at him and then quickly looking away, "but the longer I spend here the more I think I prefer the Rockhoppers, they're such tenacious little things."

There isn't an abbey here, ruined or otherwise, though there is a lighthouse it feels...symbolic. Crowley hates it on principal.

Crowley doesn't ask, 'what happened to you?' Nor does he ask, 'did something happen to your missionaries or did they happen to someone else?' He doesn't say, 'I followed the whole Chilean coast of Patagonia looking for you and your stupid penguins, until I remembered you crying your eyes out over Jules Verne's last book and realised I was on the wrong coast.' Instead he says, "bit of a trek down here from the mountains, I'm surprised you don't have, whatever the opposite of altitude sickness is, can you get the bends on dry land, how would that work?" It draws the edge of a smile to Aziraphale's face, though he still keeps his gaze fixed on the horizon. "I'm just saying, it's a heck of a long walk just to see these daft birds, charming though they may be."

Aziraphale sighs deeply before he unbends enough to lean into Crowley's shoulder, Crowley leans into him in turn, solid as the rocks below them.

"I just needed the reminder that there was good in the world, without actually being around humans for a bit," he confesses eventually.

"If you're thinking about saying anything about lights in the darkness, I'm warning you, I will get up right now and leave you here to mope. I won't have you getting all allegorical on me." Crowley warns him, unreasonably pleased when his rant provokes a genuine smile from his companion, even if it is only the ghost of one. 

"Course not," murmurs the angel into his shoulder. 

They both know he's lying, he's not going anywhere until Aziraphale's ready to move again, but nonetheless, it would never do to admit that out loud.


	4. East

Aziraphale picks his way over the pitted and cratered surface, leaving no footprints in the dust behind him. When he reaches the crest of the next rise it is clear to him that he is in the right spot, so he shakes out his picnic blanket - a surprisingly subtle green and blue tartan - and lays it down on the dusty ground which it proceeds to float just above. The low level of gravity battling the weight of Aziraphale's expectations, to ensure it mostly stays put, at least long enough for him to get settled and for Crowley to appear to weigh down the other side of it. Crowley produces a couple of nice china cups from the pocket of his coat, and Aziraphale proceeds to fill them with tea from his thermos - which matches the blanket - this proves more complicated than expected and by the time he's corralled the tea in the cups, Crowley has got distracted with something he's found in the moon dust. Aziraphale has to give him a nudge in order to get his attention and hand off the tea.

Crowley lifts his hand up to show Aziraphale whatever it is that he's been examining. Aziraphale is expecting a fragment of a crashed satellite or some other kind of space junk, but Crowley's hand initially seems empty. At Crowley's slightly exasperated exhortation to look closer, he does, right down to the microscopic level. On that scale, he can clearly see a tardigrade toiling up and down over the ridges of skin on Crowley's cupped palm. Aziraphale finds himself smiling instinctively, he's always found them cute, and was delighted when humans had developed microscopes powerful enough to see them and a pleasing number of them turned out to agreement with him. His pleasure is short lived.

"Oh dear, you're a long way from home aren't you my dear," he looks up at Crowley and asks, "did they hitch a ride with us or with this lot? They've got much more careful about bringing other species to places they're not supposed to lately." 

"Neither," Crowley assures him, "they've been here a while, probably from that lander that crash landed a few years ago."

"I thought those tardigrades were de-hydrated? There's not enough water on the moon to 'accidentally' re-hydrate them, someone would have to do it on purpose," Aziraphale contends. A meddling demon could if they wanted, but most of Crowley's former colleagues don't pay enough attention to human developments to take an interest out here. Pollution might, but he's not entirely certain that any of The Four can actually leave Earth. (Theoretically Azreal should be able to as he's technically the same sort of being as they are, but the furthest out into space that anyone has died, was just at the point of atmospheric re-entry so perhaps he either cannot or does not.)

Crowley brings his thoughts back down to Ear- the moon by replying, "true but those were on purpose, and who knows when else landers have left behind unexpected hitchhikers. Humans are much more careful than they used to be, but they don't tend to think microscopic. And then there's always..."

"Yes, there's always those."

"Brings a whole new meaning to flying toilets..."

"Yes, thank you, I'd rather not think about that," mutters Aziraphale testily. 

Crowley sniggers gently to himself at the mental image as he sets the miniscule creature free again and the two of them watch the tardigrade somersault back down into the moon dust from the - relatively - dizzy heights of less than an inch off the ground. Aziraphale decides to take advantage of the distraction and lies back on the blanket, contemplating the stars. They look different from here; the thinness of the atmosphere means they twinkle less for a start. Crowley watches Aziraphale watch the stars but doesn't look up at them himself. Aziraphale thinks about other times and places where they've gone stargazing, long conversations about human theories and discoveries regarding the stars. (He still remembers dozens of different names for the stars and their relationships in different languages over the millennia; he knows that Crowley does too.) He wonders what they look like close up, he knows that Crowley knows, but he never talks about it. Aziraphale can't decide if now would be the best or the worst time to ask about it. Instead he lets the quiet moment stretch out between them through as the tension tightens and releases and calm settles back over both of them. 

Crowley looks up suddenly and cocks his head as though listening to something just out of earshot. Immediately he pulls a pair of sunglasses out of his inside jacket pocket and puts them on. Aziraphale sits back up again and watches him expectantly for a long moment, before Crowley sighs and pulls another - rather more conservative pair - from his pocket and hands them over. Aziraphale takes them with a pleased expression and puts them on. 

All at once, the creeping dawn that has been sneaking across the surface of the plain below them, breaks over the moon-base in the centre of the plain and the rocket/shuttle combo a short distance away from it, incidentally bathing the pair of them in almost-blinding light. Space-suited humans rush out into the sunlight, and suddenly the crater is a hive of activity - highly organised chaos really - as they only have a few hours of direct sunlight to complete all their final checks. By the time the moon is looped back to the opposite side of the Earth, this particular crater will be at the closest point in Earth and Mars' respective orbits for several years. The best possible chance of success for this mission that will likely prove pivotal to justifying the moon-base's existence as a staging post. 

Crowley has manifested popcorn from somewhere and offers Aziraphale some with a grin that can only be called unholy glee. He takes some popcorn - it's sweet and salty, a flavour that Crowley had come up with to troll the humans, but which both they and Aziraphale remain oddly fond - and returns the demon's grin with a giddy one of his own. It's ridiculous. They both know exactly what is - and isn't - waiting out there for these humans to discover; these humans that have no wings and yet constantly strive to fly. Yet somehow, neither of them can help being excited to discover just what the humans make of it. 

"And yet, they move." Crowley murmurs.

"And us with them," Aziraphale agrees.


End file.
